PARTICIPATION PAYS

Participation Pays is a collation of eight thematic studies showcasing the engagements of Praxis with marginalised and resource-poor communities in diverse contexts.

The book, which is a compilation of some of our action research in different contexts where community-led and owned processes have contributed to their empowerment, documents how beneficiaries of aid can challenge and overcome conventional power arrangements imposed upon them.

The running theme through the book is how community participation is the way forward, especially now, in the context of the post-2015 (post-Millennium Development Goals) development debates. More than experts and a top-down approach, it is a bottom-up community mobilisation approach to planning, execution and evaluation that can sustain development.

SYNOPSIS

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The processes of international development often mean that beneficiaries have pre-designed programmes imposed upon them. Even the most well-intentioned development projects are often constrained by funding requirements from fulfilling their vision of social justice, with the result that poor, marginalized communities feel even more disempowered and excluded by programmes over which they have no control. Participation Pays attempts to show how beneficiaries of aid can challenge and overcome conventional power arrangements set up by donors and development agencies. It does so through a focus on community knowledge and self-generated data, control of which enables greater ownership and direction of development processes. These projects involved members of marginalized and resource-poor communities including landless people, female sex workers, tribal people, and people affected by a natural disaster. Eight thematic case studies are featured, seven from India and one from the Maldives. Participation Pays argues for the need, in any vibrant democracy, for multiple ways of making development more accountable to excluded communities. In doing so, the book invites an understanding of marginalized people not simply as beneficiaries of technical solutions, but –through the work of participatory development projects – architects of a politics of equity and democratization.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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1. Introduction: powering knowledge from the margins

2. Breaking the barriers to information: community-led land mapping in Bihar

3. Building consensus methodically: community rebuilding in the Maldives

4. Knowledge base: towards a community-owned monitoring system

5. Lost policies: locating access to infrastructure and services in rural India

6. A new deluge? People and aid in the aftermath of disaster

7. Subverting for good: sex workers and stigma

8. Making people count: from beneficiaries to evaluators

9. Reimagining development: marginalized people and the post-2015 agenda

10. Conclusion: pathways to post-2015

CHAPTERS IN A NUTSEHLL

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Breaking the barriers to information: community-led land mapping in Bihar
Marginalised groups in Bihar engaged in a community-based land mapping process which not only set age-old land records right, it created the space for them to subvert the very politics of record keeping, which is stubbornly protected by those in power.

Building consensus methodically: community rebuilding in the Maldives
Post-tsunami, bottom-up approach to identifying beneficiaries in the Maldives challenged the conventional narrative that in a post-disaster context, affected communities are too fragmented by conflicts of interest to be able to find common agreement.

Knowledge base: towards a community-owned monitoring system
In the context of the Avahan HIV prevention initiative in India, vulnerable and marginalised groups show the path of evolution from being data providers to being the owners and users of a monitoring system in the movement towards the independence of community-based organisations

Lost policies: locating access to infrastructure and services in rural India
As a five-state audit of infrastructural provision found in 2011, physical distance is not the only indicator of exclusion. Without equitable involvement of the local community, infrastructure planners risk aggravating existing patterns of exclusion.

A new deluge? People and aid in the aftermath of disaster
Following the tsunami in 2004, an unprecedented mobilisation of aid pushed governments and NGOs to act in haste without considering ground realities and local perspectives, leading to lessons on the non-negotiability of post-disaster planning

Subverting for good: sex workers and stigma
A process through which members of marginalised groups like sex workers and transgendered persons reshaped a monitoring framework to reflect issues that mattered most to them reiterated that negotiating and overcoming stigma is a critical part of the journey towards empowerment

Making people count: from beneficiaries to evaluators
A community-based evaluation of a UNDP programme was based on the premise that the community is best placed to evaluate a project which they are beneficiaries of, because they are the ones directly impacted by it.

Reimagining development: marginalized people and the post-2015 agenda
People living in poverty and marginalisation invert power relations while engaging in direct talk with policy makers at a global and national level in the framing of an alternative post-2015 development agenda.